You can go ahead with pubic-hair suggestions, pal. Whatever works.
I'm clueless about regions other than my own, but we've just put flowering shrubs and salvias everywhere and they grow very unpredictably. Maybe a blueberry bush? They like acidic soil. I think virtually everything I like to look at likes acidic soil.
(We rent, but have landscaped with great abandon, especially after the neighbor backed into the dead weeping birch street tree and tore it straight out by the roots, beautifully solving the problem of whom to call to get it removed. The fire department! Immediately! It's hanging off a wire!)
I'm partial to azaleas and forsythia but not everyone likes them and given your locations, maybe yew or bayberry?
Being a landscaping dunce, the only constructive thing I can add is to stay the hell away from ivy. Not as low maintenance as you might think.
4: The maintenance of keeping the neighbor's ivy on the neighbor's side of the fence at the old house was plenty, thanks.
Thanks for the other suggestions! I don't really know what the soil is like except kind of gross and in need of fortifying. They dumped yucky stuff under the sidewalk, so there's clay and sand and rocks. But I think I can improve it.
Only if it wants to change.
As the hot dog vendor said to the Buddhist priest.
Don't start, Moby. I have custody-related therapy this afternoon and I don't and can't care about whether those who need to change WANT to change.
We've done zinnias in our tree cutout, usually with pretty good success.
FWIW, it really collects very little detritus.
If you can grow redbud, I'd definitely recommend that. You probably know this already but sometimes the local university extension has native tree and flower recommendations, and soil testing.
Ooh, great topic, my shoulders dropped as soon as I saw it.
There are a few of these in my neighbourhood.The first roadside garden got some funny looks but turned out so well that the idea's catching on.
Successful up here (zone 4-5): spring bulbs (croci, alpine tulips, muscari snowdrops); I've seen lots of daylillies, I put in strawberries along the street last year and it was fun watching people wonder if I had meant them to be picked. I always appreciate walking past the neighbour's garden with the lavender. I've got yarrow which is tough and I like the look of it although some people mistake it for a weed. It was a weed actually until I decided it should stay.
Seconding the redbud! We put it in at my son's dad's house and I love seeing it when I go over.
Dwarf white clover is a good groundcover for sun, you'll have green during a drought and it brings nutrients to the top of the soil. Lemon thyme is good for sun too but takes much longer to establish. Sweet woodruff is my favourite for shade, bright green, tiny star flowers and smells of vanilla when you walk on it. Ajuga good for shade, in a contrasting colour, I've seen it from medium green to purple to black. Lily of the valley for shade (poisonous though, maybe when girls are older.) One year I did a chammomile lawn which was the best thing ever for one year. Smelled fantastic. The next year it reverted and was 3 feet tall. Still nce, but not a lawn any more.
Oh my god I am deliriously happy for this one second not to be thinking about that other thing...
Relatedly: I'm a bit in love with the verbatim musical London Road.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOR5-EWo-3Q
If you don't have a height restricton kids love tall sunflowers and so do birds in the fall.
If you don't have a height restricton kids love tall sunflowers and so do birds in the fall.
Woops. Okay one more, sugar snap peas or runner beans trained up a lampost. Good to eat, unlike the pods from Sweet Peas which without googling I think are poisonous.
Nictotiana for white fragrant flowers at night (annual).
...If you have shade, bleeding heart with forget-me-nots and a fuck-tonne of ferns (they time out well with each other and disguise spent tulip leaves.) And now I ban myself.
Not a lot of shade, no, but those are great suggestions, Penny! About 80% of them I had in the last garden, but you're putting it together in different helpful ways.
I won't be doing any more trees because these two take up all the space and they have to stay under power lines. There's a little garden between the fence and the porch where I've put three rose bushes and a fragrant hosta and what I hope will indeed be my black-purple irises from the old house. I have to decide how to fill in there too, but since it's protected from the street I can do fussier things I care about more.
Once this is done, the entire back yard is small but a wilderness. I'll probably let the wild mulberry growing through the fence stay and I think I'll put in a third Peggy Martin rose into the corner you can see from the street just to pull the whole look together, but there are so many options and I have no idea what else I'll do. Probably not much this year, especially if my ankle isn't up to much time with a shovel, but we'll see. There's a giant stump I love in the back yard and I'm supposed to help Mara build a fairy house out there.
I'll do a moonflower out front somewhere, probably along the street even though they get massive, and maybe the hyacinth bean vine seeds I took from the Gethsemani abbey garden will get planted this year and grow along the front porch or something. Lots of options.
Th: Did I send you the link to my Lville based cousin (my mom's cousin) who's working on bringing back the American chestnut?
Oh and we'll also have a plot in the community garden I can see from my window that's a block over from us. That way I don't have to build one and put in lead-free soil because it's already been done and we'll be all sociable and whatnot and have an excuse to walk the dog.
I almost quoted the Hamilton "What is a legacy? It's planting seeds in a garden you'll never see" to annoy neb but it annoys me too.
11: Here the extension office is by county rather than from the university. I could get some wood bee houses, I know. Our nature center does native plant sales and I'd gotten some great ones at the old house, a wild mimosa and rattlesnake master and all sorts of things. I'm looking forward to getting this together, but it'll be a little at a time. (I want a new front door too. And better siding eventually, but that may not be until next year.)
That sounds wonderful and that hyacinth bean looks amazing.
No, Charley, but I'd love to see it! Googling, is this the person who has a blog about them? Neat!
Hyacinth bean vine is so much fun! Our block dead-ends into the older girls' school, so having child-friendly plantings is a good thing and my own little bit of garden evangelism I guess. The strange paranoid neighbor across the street has nice nasturtiums. Many of the houses have roses. I think most of the Guatemalan families in the apartments across the way have window gardens, but they don't have any room to plant outside.
Nictotiana for white fragrant flowers at night (annual).
Self-seeding IME.
Hostas look nice and are very difficult to kill.
Juniper. The really pointy kind.
Dear god that's a lot of sidewalk. I used to fantasize about having houses and gardens but now know that renting tiny apartments is infinitely easier. Anyway, other people's gardens are still fun. Carry on.
We have very wide sidewalks, though I have no idea why, so it's three squares from front fence to curb in front of the house for the span of the small lot. Even taking up all this space (there's a square in the middle to get to and from the car and put the trash can out) leaves tons for everything that goes on on the sidewalk.
I would have a hard time in an apartment because kids make noise. I know they can sometimes be heard from outside the house and I hate it but I'm giving them space to be kids. In an apartment I'd hate it and explode, I suspect.
Dear god that's a lot of sidewalk kids. I used to fantasize about having houses and gardens spouses and children but now know that renting tiny apartments dying alone is infinitely easier. Anyway, other people's gardens kids are still fun. Carry on.
Don't worry, Mossy, you can have children and die alone too! Spouses might make that more difficult but maybe they can amuse each other and keep their distance from you.
Good point. Much more important to live alone prior to dying.
Everybody goes into death alone. You may as well save on rent.
But hell is other people, so why not live it up in solitude now while it's possible?
Let's just say I've seen that lead to trying to punch a nurse and flee into the snow.
Sorry, Moby, that you still have to deal with all this. (Autocorrect wanted to make you Mobutu, which on the one hand would be a sweet little diminutive and on the other oh good lord no!) I've been thinking about you and I wonder if the girls would want to make a little cob fairy house when it's time to do that. They don't believe in fairies but Mara in particular loves anything tiny and fussy and so they want to do something out there.
So what, heads of state are diminutive just because they're black?
I'm just saying that I bet the presentations on how to kick out the rear window of a police cruiser would be as interesting in nursing homes as they are in high schools.
presentations on how to kick out the rear window of a police cruiser would be as interesting in nursing homes as they are in high schools.
Nah, see, this is the problem when a best practice becomes recommended as a universal practice. I mean, I can see kicking the back window being effective for high school students because the kids are young and flexible and have a powerful kick. That's not necessarily going to work with the elderly... I think they are going to need to be taught a different set of strategies for escaping from police custody that are more adapted to their physical capacities.
Like going on endlessly about their bus transfers until the cops just leave them on a corner somewhere rather than hear another fucking word of it?
My dad used to have a great garden and a whole bunch of flowers. Then he got too old to take care of it so it's all grassed over now. Honestly, it was just way too many tomatoes for anybody to eat anyway.
But he never grew anything in the devil's strip. Probably because the yard is huge.
Like going on endlessly about their bus transfers until the cops just leave them on a corner somewhere rather than hear another fucking word of it?
Right. The key is to turn the appearance of senility into a finely-honed escape strategy.
Wikipedia has a nice collection of terms, under the general title of "Road verge" (which I don;t recall ever having heard). Devil strip is usually considered very specific to Akron (I recall it being "tree lawn" in Cleveland), but from some searching someone mentioned same term in Parkersburg WV (historically pretty close AKron/WV cultural ties.). It appeared on signage.
I see that The Devil Strip is now an Akron music/arts/culture magazine.
